


Girls In Blue

by Kalya_Lee



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Cafe AU, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-26
Packaged: 2017-12-30 06:26:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah-Jane opened Blue Box Tea and Cake ten years ago, painted the police-box-blue front door herself with youth-soft hands and slightly tired eyes. It’s spunky and homey and warm and unconventional, a vibrant, breathing being. Just like her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tea

Sarah-Jane opened Blue Box Tea and Cake ten years ago, painted the police-box-blue front door herself with youth-soft hands and slightly tired eyes. Ten years on, her hands are larger and stained slightly with tea and her crisp white boss-shirts are lightly streaked with batter, but the Blue Box is as lovely and living as ever.

It’s a quaint place, a tiny shop bursting with anachronisms and light. There are soft squishy armchairs and metal-and-glass benches, tan leather jumpseats and an always-full cake bar, all brass and crystal and confection, sitting on an actual glass floor.

It’s _solid_ , the shop, a fact of Sarah’s life. It’s spunky and homey and warm and unconventional, a vibrant, breathing being. Just like her.

 _(She’d never wanted to own a tea shop. When she was young she’d thought she would be_ someone _, a journalist, an explorer. Someone who travelled. Someone who heard and saw and did. She would become someone who collected stories, someone who would go somewhere new and make them for herself. All she needed was somebody to take her there._

_In time, she’d grown tired of waiting._

_She collects stories, still, hears them over the rims of teacups and reads them in chocolate-crumb patterns on her grandmother’s china. She collects stories and stays where she is and makes tea, and swallows the dreams that were never her life anyway.)_

***

Rose is a waitress, only nineteen and already the best Sarah’s ever had. She serves tea like an artist, hands deft on the pots, whipping hot milk into foam roses for the lattes with a gentle smile and a roguish wink.Her eyes are soft.

She smiles like a whipcord when she quips with the customers and her laugh is loud and bright, and once, just once, she caught a man striking his date across a table dark with spilled Darjeeling and threw him out with a whisper like an oncoming storm, but her eyes are soft. They’re always soft.

_(Sarah-Jane tried to promote her, once, wanted her to run the front-of-house, but Rose had refused._

_“I can’t,” she’d said, and laughed, her eyes warm and sorrowful. “I don’t even have any A-levels. I wouldn’t know how.”_

_Sarah knows it isn’t true, thinks it as she watches Rose had a steaming mug to a man in black leather with eyes like the grave. He’s a regular, comes in every day but Sunday and always orders a single cup of Earl Grey. He takes it without sugar, without cream, as if bitter tea could be an appropriate penance for anything._

_Rose saves a special smile for him, tongue caught between her teeth as she grins, and he takes his mug from her with a beaming smile to her soft eyes._

_He never used to smile at Sarah, when she served it.)_

***

Martha runs the till, a part-time stint to pay her way through medical school. She’s quiet and clever, always composed, always respectful, with a glint in her eye that had made Sarah hire her on the spot. She keeps her distance while she works, but on her breaks she puts her hair up, curls up in a corner with a cup of tea, and talks.

She tells the other girls long, rolling stories, tells them about her classes and her professors and her dreams. She loves her family, they learn, and she wants to take care of them. She wants to give her sister a passion, to give her father a reason to settle, to give her mother a trip to the therapist. She wants impossible things. One day, she says, eyes bright over her mug, she’s going to save the world.

_(Rose had grinned at Martha on her first day, sitting next to her on her first break, laughed and called her “Doctor”. Martha remembers how that had felt, like the weight of expectations and the terror of failure and the tantalizing electric burden of capability._

_It had felt like a mission, like ‘first do no harm’, like being enough. It had felt uncomfortable. It itched against her skin, the title like a mantle she longed for and could never hope to fit. Martha Jones, the doctor. Martha Jones, the good._

_She had taken another sip of tea. Winked at Rose. “Not yet.”)_

***

Donna is the General Manager. Sarah-Jane had hired her two years back from the Chiswick Temp Agency and could never find it in herself to return her. She blows through the kitchen and the tearoom like a whirlwind of red hair and sharp wit and loud voice, and behind her things lift and fly and _settle_ , all in their proper places. Sarah’s never seen anything like it. She would suspect that she never will again, but then Donna comes and does it every day.

The other girls salute her, call her General Noble, Rose and Martha with laughing affectionate smiles and Amy with a knowing smirk and Mels with an almost-mutinous grin. Donna laughs, every time they do it, and she stand straighter and plants her hand on her hip and barks her orders like a drill sergeant, but sometimes her voice falls, just a little, and her eyes go a bit dark and longing, like she’s looking at something wonderful that’s about to fly away.

_(Martha had hugged her, right after the catering job – Blue Box’s first and last and only, the wedding of Donna’s ex and a woman that she only ever called The Spider – when they were both high on sneaked espresso and thirty-six hours of cupcakes and no sleep. Donna had held things together, then, snarling at the wedding planner and scrubbing the kitchen with her own hands and storming through six different Tescos for five kilos of Emergency Cake Flour. When it was over Donna had bags under her eyes and chocolate streaks in her red hair and Martha’s arms wrapped around her waist._

_“Donna Noble,” Martha had said, pulling back for a tired-happy salute, “You’re a marvel, you are.”_

_Donna had smiled, tired from more than the hours. “Nah,” she said, “I’m just a temp from Chiswick.”_

_“Not anymore,” with a teasing grin. “You’re officially on the payroll now, remember.”_

_And Donna had looked at her with the smile of the disbelieving, and said nothing.)_

***

Amy and Mels make the cupcakes. They stay in the kitchen, for the most part, and they fly around each other with a kind of clockwork madness, baking and icing and laughing into each others’ batter. They’ve come up with fifteen different cupcake flavours in the nine months they’ve been here, and a line of special cupcakes for the regulars, ten of them so far. There’s a fluffy vanilla one filled with miniature jelly babies and iced with a broad brown-and-orange stripe that Sarah-Jane just loves, and a black-coffee flavoured one iced shiny black that makes Rose blush, and a blue-and-brown pinstriped one stuffed with blueberries and bananas that Martha always buys.

Amy is fiery, bright and bold like her hair, and she bakes with the methodical determination  of one possessed. Her eyes are lit from the inside, like candles in a window, and sometimes she stares into space with the tiredness of someone weary of waiting and unwilling to stop, and sometimes only the shrilling of her oven timers can make her blink, smile, move. She doesn’t need a timer, really, bakes by instinct and experience. She always sets them anyway.

Mels is quieter, darker in colouring and in the eyes. She bakes like a hurricane, wild and unstoppable, dancing circles around Amy’s calm. Her eyes are shadowed, bristling with the thrumming electricity of the restless, and the hair she refuses to tie back whips across her shoulders as she stirs and whisks and ices. She never uses electric mixers. She needs something to do with her hands while the cakes bake.

They fit together, Amy and Mels, like two halves of a whole. They’re best friends and partners and complimentary pieces, Amy the light to Mels’ shadow, Mels the energy to Amy’s patience. Amy shops with Rose on their lunch hour, and Mels loves giving Donna hell, and both of them love Martha’s stories and Sarah’s smiles, but they’re always _them_ , Amy-and-Mels, and when they drink tea they only ever drink with each other.

_(There was a question of nametags, back when they were first hired. All the staff were getting them, but neither Amy nor Mels knew what theirs should say. Amy was always Amelia, when she was little, grew up and grew tired grew out of her home as Amelia Pond. She used to think, when she was small, that someday someone would see her and think her special and amazing, would say to her, “Amelia Pond, come away with me and I’ll take you somewhere new.”_

_She waited, for the longest time, and one day she snapped and moved out all on her own and changed her name to Amy. She’ll never admit that, somewhere in her child’s mind, she always assumed that it was her name that was the problem, that it was too long or too hard to say, too hard to call from the stars. She’ll never admit that being Amelia makes her shiver now._

_Mels was christened River Song, and it’s not a name she answers to. Her parents and their love are things she never speaks of, things that make her dark eyes darker and her brisk smile sharp enough to cut. She named herself, when she first went to school. Melody was close enough to Song, and far enough away for her to hide in, to let her change her face and herself._

_After she met Amy she started signing her forms as Melody Pond instead of Song, River, and they never stopped thinking it was funny. They’re Mels and Amy more than they’re River and Pond, and Mels is as far from a sister as Amy will ever meet, but it fits, somehow. Melody Pond is a wild, brilliant girl, and River Song is someone her parents knew, someone she is and isn’t and will never, she thinks, stop running from._

_Mels runs. Amy waits. In the end, it was decided that kitchen staff don’t need nametags._

_Neither of them complained.)_     


	2. Cake

Sarah-Jane doesn’t know when it was that she decided to become a Mother. She thinks of the word with a slight shiver, regards it in all its capitalized glory, and wonders if she’ll ever know how it ever became so appealing. She never was the mothering type, never wanted to settle down. Never wanted the crying and the diapers and the first words, first steps, first everything. Never imagined she ever would.

It doesn’t matter, in the end. She gets none of this with Luke. She gets nothing besides a sullen teenager and a pile of Foster Parent paperwork and a grumpy social worker on her doorstep, but she becomes a mother all the same.

Luke takes a while to get settled, and Sarah takes a while to get acclimatized, and for weeks they hover around the house like strangers, forming their own little uncomfortable orbits around each other. Luke keeps watching Sarah like she might just up and run away, and she finds it hard to assure him that _no, she isn’t_ when all she can think is _why, why, why did I do this? How could I possibly have been so stupid?_

She brings him cupcakes, though, from the shop, and he smiles, and that’s something.

On their third Cupcake Day – vanilla and jelly-baby, she _is_ awfully fond of those – Luke slides across the couch towards her as she fiddles with her laptop and reaches over her shoulder to adjust her messy spreadsheet. Her mind clicks back over the past few weeks, Luke’s fingers flying over her keyboard, the three-years-ahead calculus homework, all complete, littering her _(their)_ dining-room table, and she asks if he’d do her a favour and fix Blue Box’s accounts. He’s excited to see the shop, and it’s decided.

The next morning Sarah wakes him early and they drive to the shop together. Luke is shy in the car and shy as they step through the bright blue door and even shier when Rose grins at him and Amy winks and Mels smirks and tweaks his ear, but then Donna orders them away and Martha shows him the books, and in less than three hours the accounts are all in order and the computers all have upgraded operating systems and the till is connected to the main data bank and wired to update a master spreadsheet automatically, and Luke is sitting behind Sarah-Jane’s laptop, smirking.

Sarah glows, brings him a cupcake, ruffles his hair. Luke smiles up at her, and it is _perfect_.

“Love your boy, he’s a bloody genius,” says Donna, beaming at them. “I gotta get me one of those!”

Sarah laughs, throws an arm around him. She hears a loud sniff from the far corner of the tea room, and her head whips round, but her arm stays.

“I never knew you had a son, Sarah-Jane!” calls the loud, nasal voice of one of Sarah’s regulars. She’s a middle-aged lady, Mrs Cane or something-or-other, and the smile on her face is wary, patronizing. “Wherever have you been hiding him?”

“Nowhere,” says Sarah, tightening her arm. “Just got him, in fact. Best present of my life.” She tilts her head, looks at Luke’s face. His smile’s gone soft, a little crooked, and she squeezes his shoulder lightly.

“Oh,” says Mrs Cane, oozing sympathy, “he’s not _really_ your son, then.”

“He is absolutely my son,” snaps Sarah-Jane, glaring. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches Rose discreetly spitting in a cup of tea before sliding it smoothly onto Mrs Cane’s table, and decides the girl needs a raise.

Mrs Cane sips her tea, sickly-sweet smile still firmly in place. “He’s not a – ah, _product_ of you and Mr Smith, though, is he?”

Sarah looks down at Luke, pale and unsmiling, and thinks _no, so what,_ and _I love him anyway_ and _what’s it to you, you cow_. “He is,” she says instead, and smirks as Mrs Cane stares.

“Luke,” she says, smiling gently at him, “would you shut Mr Smith down and put him back in the laptop bag, please? I think that cupcake would taste better in the park.”

They step out of the shop and into the sunlight in silence, and make it all the way down the road before they both burst out laughing. They share the cupcake as they walk, and Luke slips his hand into Sarah’s, and as she knits their fingers together her buried dreams fade, one by one, into the light.

***

Rose leaves Blue Box on a dark winter night.

She is fighting with Mickey, of all things, and their arguments are usually civil and ice-cool and they keep them in her flat or his, but this time it is hot and brutal and it winds through the tearoom and behind the cake bar and across the shining glass floor. Rose is crying and Mickey is shaking, and they’ve both by now forgotten how it started but this is how it ends.

“You think I’m nothing!” shouts Mickey, raw and hurting. “You think I’m nothing, don’t you Rose? You think I’m nothing and nobody and you can do _better_!”

Rose says nothing, face blank and running with tears, thinks _no_ and _yes_ and _please, not now, not here_. Mickey is raging, now, and he never does this, never wants to hurt her, but it is too much for him. Somewhere deep inside she understands.

“But what about you?” spits Mickey. “What about you, Rose, you’re a _waitress_ in a _tea shop_!”

And this is the truth of it, isn’t it, this is the truth of _them_ , the reason neither of them can ever win. He is nothing. And so is she.

“Fine,” says Rose, hands shaking and voice calm, broken, calm. “Fine, then. I quit.”

Mickey stills. “Quit and do what?”  

“I don’t know,” says Rose, and she doesn’t. She thinks of empty days without the peace of mixing tea and waiting tables, without a steady paycheck and shopping trips with Amy and joking around with Donna, without a purpose or a meaning or an occupation. She thinks of empty days, and then she thinks _nothing nothing nothing_.

“I’ll go back to school, maybe. Get another job. Go _travelling_.” She laughs, harsh and bitter, because she won’t. “Maybe I’ll go home and hang myself. What’s it to you?”

Mickey gapes at her for a second, horrified. “No,” he says, panicked and remorseful, eyes wide. “No, Rose, that’s not – I didn’t mean – “

She closes her eyes – _nothing nothing nothing_ – and when she opens them again they’ve gone like steel. “ _What’s it to you?_ ” she growls, both a challenge and a plea, and then she turns and flies out the door.

In the back, a man in a black jacket sets his mug down on the table, carefully. He rises, brushes past a frozen Mickey, and slips out after her.

The night is chilled, the pavement icy. A bitter wind whips across the trees, blowing the gentle snowfall into a blizzard, a painful caricature of a perfect Christmas night. Rose runs, and runs, and when a man with a harsh smile and a soft voice and piercing blue eyes calls her name, she doesn’t stop running. He seems to understand, never asks her to stop, and when he catches up he slips his hand into hers and they run together.

Later, they will stop, and he will plant his hands on her shoulders and look her deep in the eyes and say “Rose Tyler, you are _fantastic_.” Later, she will believe him. Later, she will fall towards him in the middle of a blizzard-blown street and he will hold her as she cries like the end of the world.

Later, they will swing their linked hands and go out for chips, and in the morning she will go back and apologize to Sarah-Jane and it will be alright, really. She will buy a black-iced cupcake with her employee’s discount, and she will make it a point to serve extra cream with his tea. Later.

Now, they run, and the angry freezing wind blows the tears off Rose’s cheeks and the pounding of their hearts and the warmth of a hand in hers drowns out the _nothing_ that echoes through her mind. For now, they run, and it is enough, and so is she.

***

Martha has her graduation party inside the Blue Box. She’s done the big celebrations already, gone out with her school friends the night before the ceremony and had her posh Celebratory Lunch with her family right after, but this is the one that feels the most _real_.

The shop’s been closed specially for the occasion, the tearoom draped with streamers. There’s a table by the window stacked with cards and cake and presents, and another crowded with chairs and laughing people. It’s beautiful, the way sunlight drifts through the barely-dusty windows to play across the white starched tablecloths, how the tea forms steam across smiling faces, how a room full of people – wonderful, vibrant, _important_ people – chat and bump elbows and grin, crowd around a table to celebrate _her_.

Martha leans back against the cake bar, away from it all, and just watches for a while.   

“Hey,” says Donna, peeling away from the table and stepping up beside her. “So. Hiding from your own party, that can’t be normal.”

“I’m not,” says Martha, and Donna shoots her a look. Martha laughs. “Not hiding, I mean, just watching. Although I’m not exactly normal either, I suppose.”

Donna rolls her eyes, retrieves a package from the presents table. “Here,” she says, handing it over. “You can open this one, first.”

The paper is old-looking, yellowed and crackly and nearly see-through like aged vellum. Martha slides a thumb under a piece of sticky tape and lifts it, gently, peeling it away. It’s a leather suitcase, heavy and well-made, with sturdy brass clasps and a gorgeous chocolate-brown covering. Martha hefts it in her hands, feels the weight of it. “Donna,” she breathes, eyes wide, “It’s beautiful, you shouldn’t have.”

Donna bounces, just slightly, on the balls of her feet. She bites her lip. “Well, your handsome Captain over there,” she says, nodding to the table, “mentioned something about you walking the earth.” She shrugs. “It was this or a pair of sensible shoes.”

Martha laughs again, pulling Donna into a one-armed hug, suitcase dangling from her fingers. It’s not a big deal, really, this “walking the earth” – one of Jack’s most ridiculous attempts at verbosity, in her opinion. She’s taking a year off, is all, going on humanitarian missions with her friend Tom from school. He’s trained in pediatric care, she’s trained in emergency medicine, and the two of them may be green but they both felt ready. They’d asked Jack to fly the plane, something that Martha still isn’t too sure about. On the one hand, he’s a nice guy, charming in the extreme, _and_ he was once in the RAF, an actual Air Force Captain. On the other hand, he was _discharged_ from the RAF, either for flying into enemy fire for a lost cause one time too many or for sleeping with all of his superior officers – his story changes, depending on what mood he’s in.

Plus, he wasn’t supposed to tell. Martha shoots him a dirty look over Donna’s shoulder, and he at least has the decency to leave off flirting with Rose long enough to shrug. Possibly apologetically. Martha rolls her eyes.

She wanders away from the cake bar, goes to join the others, and they hand their parcels to her with shy smiles and sheepish smiles and bright, radiant laughter. It’s all a bit overwhelming. Rose has given her a cloth-wrapped journal, beautifully bound. Amy and Mels have baked special cupcakes, limited edition, named after her, all toffee-swirled and iced in rich brown and black and hot pink. Sarah-Jane hands her a tiny box, and inside is a little key on a chain. It’s the same key she handed in a week ago, with her resignation, now buffed and polished till it shines. The key to Blue Box. Martha draws it out, cradles it in her palm, and as it catches the light something catches in her throat.

There is a clink of glasses, the scraping of chairs, and Amy and Mels stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, tea mugs raised. “We would like to propose a toast,” says Amy, clearing her throat, and Mels rolls her eyes and grins.

“We wanted,” begins Mels, with a wicked glint in her eye, “to toast Martha Jones, the woman who saved the world.” She pauses dramatically, and Martha inhales, holds it. “But we can’t. Because you haven’t yet.”

“So,” continues Amy, sliding in before Martha’s smile can even begin to slip, “we raise a toast to Martha Jones, the woman who will.” She raises her tea mug higher. “To Martha,” shouts Amy, Mels’ voice coming in just a beat after.

“To Martha!” the others cry, and Martha thinks she will, too.

Later, when the tea is finished and the guests are going home, Martha helps Rose clean up. Rose smiles at her over a piece of loose crepe paper, almost maternally, a teasing light in her warm brown eyes.

“So,” she says, winding the paper absently round her hands, “you finally made it, huh? Doctor Jones.”

Martha stops, freezes, for just a second. “Just Martha’s fine,” she says, as casually as possible. She means every word.

“Yes,” says Rose, looking her dead in the eye, and that is all.

***

The newest waitress is a sweet young thing named Jenny. She’s very young and very blond and a bit naive, and from her first day she’s glommed on to Donna like a particularly persistent fridge magnet. Donna doesn’t mind, not really. It’s her job to train the new staff, after all, and anyway Jenny is gentle but practical and innocent but knife-sharp, and Donna likes her. Really likes her.

The customers like her, too. Sometimes Donna thinks they like her a bit too much.

Jenny is lean and lanky, some sort of dancer or gymnast in a past life, Donna shouldn’t wonder. She watches her as she sashays through the tearoom, hips swaying gently with the unselfconsciousness of youth, as she leans over to clear empty cups and deliver plates stacked with fluffy sponges. Watches as Jenny smiles and waves and dances her way across the tearoom, drawing lingering gazes from the far corners.

Watches as a man with angry eyes and a leering grin – _creep_ , Donna thinks, eyes narrowing – casts a slow, savoring look over her long thin legs…. And slips a hand into the back pocket of her jeans.

Jenny freezes, face white and eyes wide, but doesn’t scream. Donna does.

“Oi!” she roars, and every eye in the tearoom swivels to her as she drives an angry path across the floor. She fixes the creep with a searing glare. He slides his hand away, looking almost sheepish, and Donna resists the urge to smirk. Not yet, she thinks. _Almost_ sheepish is not sheepish enough.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she demands, not lowering her voice. “Having a little sponge cake with a feel-up on the side? This is a _tea shop_ , not some sleazy massage parlour, so keep your hands off my wait staff, you _pervert_!”

The man flinches, slightly, but refuses to back down. He levels Donna with a bored stare. “Is this,” he says, coolly, arching an eyebrow, “how your – ah – _tea shop_ always treats its customers? Or are you embarking on a new service policy?”

He sits back and sips his tea, a small smirk on his face. He looks smug, so smug, and meanwhile Jenny has scurried off into the kitchen to hide. Donna wants to slap him so badly. She takes a deep breath, instead, and smiles her best Professional Smile. It’s just a bit razor-tipped. She likes it better that way.

“No, sir,” she says, still smiling at him, “Blue Box has always prided itself on its policy of mutual respect. We prefer to treat the customers as treasured friends, and, understandably, expect them to behave likewise.”

He raises his eyebrow again. Donna entertains fantasies of chopping it off with a paring knife. Just briefly. For a second. “And that means….”

“That means,” says Donna, iron creeping back into her voice, “that we respect the customers that don’t treat our staff like _meat_ , and if you don’t like it, _sir_ , you can go and get your sponge cake somewhere else.”

The man’s eyes flash dangerously. He leans in, towards Donna, and she does not lean away. “Well, if you girls aren’t interested in being _meat_ ,” he retorts, half-rising, “what are you worth, really?”

Silence reigns, for a short moment, the calm before the storm. The other customers stare at Donna as if they’re looking at a ticking bomb. A few of the regulars are smiling, amused.

“I am,” says Donna, voice tight and heroically not-screeching, “sick, and _tired_ , of men acting like women are made for them to gawk at. We are, all of us, more than that.” She takes a breath, holds it, lets it go. Her eyes are dangerous. Her hand seizes around the creep’s cake plate, tightens into a fist.

“You act as if a pretty girl doesn’t have the right to _walk_ without giving you license to think of her as a prize, and animal, a _thing_. You act like older, less _attractive_ women aren’t worth your time of day. You think that anyone who isn’t as rich, or as educated, or as _testosterone-loaded_ as you is part of an inferior species. Well, let me tell you something, mister,” she snarls, leaning right into his face, eyes blazing gold, like firelight.

“None of us are worthless, not one. That girl who you just _violated_ , who is right now crying in the back room, is _important_. And _you_ ,” she spits, and straightens, hand planted on her hip, “are no longer wanted in this tearoom.”

The man blinks, and blinks again. He rises fully, after a beat, shoves his chair hard against the wall and stalks into the aisle. He brushes past Donna, throwing his shoulder against hers, and fixes her with a final angry glare. “I suppose,” he says, mocking, “that you think you’re the most important woman in the world.”

Donna smiles, a real smile, full of light. “Nah,” she says, nearly laughing, “I’m just a temp from Chiswick. Now _get out of my shop_.”

She lifts her hand, the one with the plate of sponge, aims it at his head. The sponge smears across his shoulder as he runs out the door. Donna watches after him as he goes.

She casts a nervous glance at Sarah-Jane, who had migrated over to the cake bar, watching the drama with a stern look on her face. Sarah regards her for a moment, then breaks into a wide grin, shaking her head in clearly-false disapproval. Rose beams at her from across the room, eyes bright and laughing.

Behind her, the tearoom explodes with applause. Donna just stands, for a moment, left hand covered in cream frosting, then she throws back her head and laughs and laughs and _laughs_.

***  

Amy stays in the Blue Box kitchen on Halloween night, up to her wrists in batter. The shop’s been closed for hours, but Amy’s got her own key, and Sarah-Jane hadn’t tried _too_ hard to throw her out, anyway.

She stirs the batter, an experimental thing involving tinned pumpkin and probably too much cinnamon, with a worrying bone-deep intensity, staring at the wall and humming loud enough to block out the sounds of children running in the street. Mels sidles up to her, apron off, and bumps up against her hip. Amy jumps.

“Come on, Aunty Misery,” says Mels, with a grin in her voice and concern in her eyes. “Trapped in a tea shop by a bunch of kids in sheets, you ought to be ashamed.”

Amy rolls her eyes, longsuffering, shaking pumpkin clumps off her fingers. “I’m not _trapped_ in here, for the last time. I’m _working_.”

“Right,” Mels snorts. “You keep telling yourself that.”

The sound of footfalls outside grows louder, joined by trilling laughter and the clatter of dropped candy on the pavement. Amy sighs.   

“They don’t _scare_ me, exactly, the children,” she says, and thinks, _I’m going to regret this_. “It’s just…..” Her hands flap, spraying a cinnamon-scented drop of gloop onto her face. She sighs again, thinking back to autumn nights in Leadworth, of going from house to house in her stupid childish clothes, dressed up like a ladybug or a bee or something equally pedantic, of handfuls of candy tainted with soppy, condescending smiles, of running up to gaggles of tiny ghosts and witches and being repelled by a look that said, that says, _you’re not like us, we don’t want you._

Amy flails some more. She has no words, really, for that kind of experience, and no hope that Mels would understand, Mels who spent those lonely Halloweens soaping up old lady’s windows by her blissful cheeky self.  Mels who smiles at her now, motherly and out of character and _disconcerting_ , and says, too gently, “Rory’s waiting, out front.”

“Then take him home with you,” says Amy, too sharply. “Buy him a drink or something if he wants company,” she continues, a bit more gently, because she loves him and she loves Mels and they all love each other, truly. “I'll pay for the first round. You kids have fun.”

“Someday,” murmurs Mels, “you’re going to realize that we’re not interchangeable. Not to him.”

 She’s gone before Amy can ask her what, exactly, she means by that. She turns back to her batter with a huff.

The batter’s smooth within minutes, and Amy rinses her hands in the sink, sluicing the wet flour off with maybe a bit more care than she needs to. She’s cleaning her left index cuticle when a step rings out, sharp and painfully audible against the linoleum. Amy freezes for a moment, then turns back to her cuticle, her back slightly stiff.

“Mels said,” says the person standing behind her, and Amy whirls involuntarily, cursing herself all the while, “that you were refusing to leave, and she asked me to come in and make you get out, please.”

“No boys in the kitchen,” says Amy, automatically, then, “How did you get in, anyway? And,” her eyes narrow, looking him up and down, “why are you dressed in _that_?”

Rory is standing in front of her, in the middle of her kitchen, in all his plastic Roman glory. He’s got a faux-leather battle skirt thing and a ridiculously contoured chest plate, and _is that a sword_? Amy’s eyes pop out, ever so slightly, and she bites her lip to hold in a hysterical giggle. Rory rocks back on his heels, feathered helmet clutched under his left arm, and tries to appear haughty.

“Mels told me to,” he says, by way of explanation, sounding only barely rueful. “And she may also have given me her keys.”

 “Sarah-Jane is going to kill her,” begins Amy. She is about to say, _if I don’t get her first_. But then Rory steps forward, confident in a way that is so utterly unlike him, and corners her between the counter and the sink and _him_ , and the words die in her throat.

"She also told me to tell you," he says, voice low, "that the two of you are not interchangeable, and that she cannot possibly be expected to take your place. In fact," and he cocks his head, considers her. His voice drops even further. "I don't think anyone could."

She looks up at him, uncomprehending, and then she looks in his eyes and she understands. Rory's eyes are burning, lit from the inside, and looking at him is almost like looking in a mirror. There's longing in his eyes, just like there's longing in hers, and behind that an emotion that Amy is afraid to name. _Love_ , she thinks, just for a second, then she shuts her eyes because she won't think it, no she will not. 

"I'm sorry," Amy says, stupidly. "I must have kept you waiting awfully long."

"Interminably," agrees Rory, and he leans in. 

It is everything that she expected, and it is not. Amy had always tried not to think about kissing Rory, but when she had thought about it she'd imagined that it would be sort of dull. She'd thought that it would be a lot like him, strong and gentle and resolute, and it was, but then again she'd also assumed that it would be steady and predictable because Rory was steady and predictable and it wasn't, it isn't. 

Kissing Rory does not feel like a rock, of Gibraltar or otherwise. It feels like a fire, and Amy is surprised, like she always forgets that she always is with him, and she thinks, _I will not think it_ and she does anyway. 

She wraps her arms around him, her palms wet against his ridiculous costume, and he feels like warmth and home and he smells like cinnamon and dust after rain. He leans back and she doesn't want to let him, but she does because she knows that he is pulling _back_ , he is not pulling _away_. 

He grins at her, lifts the helmet in his hand. It's held upside-down, the chin strap acting like a handle, and Rory shakes it, smile bright with half-sardonic delight. He holds his other hand out to her, his right. 

"Amy," he says, very seriously. "Amelia Pond. Come with me?"

Amy stares at him, at his burning eyes and outstretched arm and open hand. Her ears ring. Outside, the children run, and they laugh, and Amy feels her heart beat with their pattering footsteps, pounding out of her chest. 

"There's candy to be had, too," adds Rory, smiling a very Rory-like smile. "Good candy. The candy back in Leadworth was all crap."

Amy laughs, startled and free. "Alright," she says, grinning like a loon, and takes his hand.  She leaves the batter on the counter, forgotten. At least she remembers to turn the tap off. 

As they leave together, she reaches out and drops her egg  
timer in the bin. 

***

“Amy,” Mels informs him, “will kill you when she finds out you’ve been in here. No boys allowed in the kitchen, she’s very strict.” She smiles up at him, a sultry sort of half-smile, and tries to telegraph him messages with her eyes. _You should go_ , she thinks, hard, _You should get out, now,_ the thought pressing painfully against her irises.

He looks deep into them, blinks, and her heart skips because he’s _seen_ , she knows it. He only smiles back, though, a soft, dizzy grin, and most definitely does not turn and walk away. She can’t decide if she’s disappointed. She ought to be.

“She won’t,” he says, complacently. “She likes me.” And she does, too, bless her. Amy loves this bow-tied freak, with his baby’s face and ancient eyes, burning gently like deep-space supernovas.  “He’s good for you,” Amy had said, squeezing Mels’ shoulder, and she had rolled her eyes and said “Yeah, okay, _mom_ ,” and Amy had flicked her with batter and that had been the end of it. But Amy isn’t here, now, and Mels finds herself caught at bay, terrified in her own territory with this man who would never hurt her and would never break her and refuses to walk away.

“I’m supposed to be a psychopath,” she says, with a forced lightness that’s carefully casual. _You should leave. Leave now._ She leans back against the kitchen counter, looking up at him. At his gentle dark eyes and flop of child’s hair and softly-sad smile, and she wants to stop talking, wants to put up a wall like she always does, and she can’t. He sees through all of them, anyway. “We were the mad girls, back home. Amy and me, that’s what they called us. She was Mad Amelia, the girl who waited, and I was Mad Mels, Psychopath.”

She’d been whipping a bowl of pastry cream when he came in, but now the whisk hangs from her fingers, cream pooling at the base. She can’t bring herself to carry on whisking, can’t move to put it back in the bowl, can’t look away. Her fingers twitch. He catches them, and she lets him, somehow.

“She was always so proud of that name, of the waiting. I wasn’t,” softly, and she blinks hard like it doesn’t hurt.

His hand tightens around her fingers, his palm soft and tender, and he’s not scared of her, how is he not scared of her? “You’re not a psychopath,” he murmurs, voice oddly dangerous. His eyes bore into hers, with all the intensity of a gentle soul on fire, warm and knowing and _seeing_. So full of love, and he sees her and he loves her, _how can he love her_ , and it’s amazing and beautiful and completely terrifying.

She wants to pull away, yank his hand out of his, curl it into a fist. She wants to shake him, to hit him, to hurt him until he understands how _able_ she is to hurt him, how easy it would be. She wants to show him that she’s dangerous, wants to make him believe it, because she _is_ , she is so dangerous and she is so terrified and she wants to tear her clothes and scream, _why won’t you go, please, please, before I break you the way I’m broken?_

And she wants to kiss him, wants to keep him. Wants to take him and his moments and hold them like a fragile bird in the cup of her hands, to crystallize them and keep them in her pocket forever. She wants to bake him into a cake, into a recipe that she can keep on her fridge and own and _understand_. She has one in mind, already. It’ll be red velvet, she knows, red velvet with caramel piped through like a golden swirl of light, iced pure dazzling white with a marzipan bowtie. It will be soft and delicious and surprising, just like him, and she wants to tell him about it. She wants to tell him, wants to believe it will sound like _I love you_.

She wants impossible things.

“I’m not Mels, either,” she says instead, because she hates it and he loves her and it’s _true_. She isn’t Mels, not legally and not really, not in any way that really matters. She wants to be Mels, wild carefree Mels with crazy schemes and lightning smiles, Mels who is cracked instead of broken. She hates being Mels, someone lonely, Mels the Psychopath, Mels the running, Mels who will never be healed.

She pulls her hand away, finally, but gently, and she reaches up for the brown sugar, sets a pan on the stove, starts a caramel sauce. The cocoa goes next, whipped up with red food colouring and her failed pastry cream and a dusting of flour. She works like the wind, greasing a fresh cupcake pan and whisking her new batter and flying about to ignore the ache in her gut.

He stands behind her as she runs, a small smile in his old eyes, leaning up against the kitchen sink as if he had nothing better to do than stand here and watch a crazy girl bake. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he will watch her run forever. Maybe one day he will run with her, too.

She draws out the process as long as she can. It takes her all of fifteen minutes. Not nearly long enough.

“Then what shall I call you, Miss Melody Pond?” he asks her, into the frenzied worn-out silence, when the mix is done and the caramel finished bubbling. His tone is light and his smile is wide, guileless, open. She looks up from pouring the batter, blinks, he is still looking.

He sees her. It burns. She’s never wanted to be seen. She is too dark, too fast, too hard and brave and scared – but _oh_ , she is just so _tired_ of running.

She turns away, bends down to slide the cupcakes in the oven. Golden light swirls, spills from her hands, slides into the light. There are tears in her eyes.

“Call me River.”


End file.
